


don’t give up, don’t hang on (to anything i’ve said)

by therm0dynamics



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Character Study, M/M, Other, give villains some nuance 2k18
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 09:20:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16405664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therm0dynamics/pseuds/therm0dynamics
Summary: “He who can live in infamy is unworthy of life,” Drake intones, some Ivy League, fortune cookie bullshit. “You know what I did. And yet, you chose to save me.”





	don’t give up, don’t hang on (to anything i’ve said)

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [别放弃，别坚持（对于我所说的任何事情)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16563794) by [popopopoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/popopopoke/pseuds/popopopoke)



> my thoughts toward carlton drake hover somewhere between “cool motive, still murder” and “they wasted a perfectly good riz ahmed” so i wrote a character study about it. title by frnkiero andthe cellabration.

There’s another body on the riverbank.

Eddie sees it when he drags himself out of the water. And though he’s exhausted to the point of delirium, bloody and singed and ears still ringing, he pulls himself over the shore, toward the form lying prone in a heap of still-smoldering rocket debris.

It’s Carlton Drake — barely. He’s bent at an unnatural angle from the fall he’d taken, a spear of rebar impaling him precisely at the join of arm and shoulder, reeking of jet fuel and melted plastic. Burned nearly beyond recognition, just one horrible mass of flaking, oozing, blackened flesh. That’s how Eddie knows Riot is dead, because otherwise, Drake wouldn’t be in this condition.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, in horror and pity and morbid fascination. He breathes through his mouth, squeamish, his stomach churning but unable to tear himself away.

In response, the mangled corpse takes a breath and lets out a quiet, shuddering noise.

“Shit! Shit, Venom, he’s still alive,” Eddie says, startling backward in surprise.

**_We can still eat him. I don’t like my meat well-done, but we are hungry, Eddie._ **

Eddie’s eyes widen. He swallows down the urge to vomit and looks around wildly like there’s anyone else out in the middle of the cold windswept bay that can do something, anything. In the distance, he hears sirens, the overhead thrum of a police chopper. They’re going to be too late.

“No, I have to help him, _we_ have to help him.”

**_He is Riot’s host. He tried to kill us._ **

Eddie thinks about Riot, about starving unwashed people huddled in the clinical cold of a laboratory cell, dead symbiotes, dead bodies. Drake is a bad, bad, _bad,_ bad man. He doesn’t deserve to live.

**_So why save him, Eddie?_ **

“I don’t know! I don’t know, but we have to, come on, please,” Eddie says, and kneels over Drake’s body. He feels Venom stirring reluctantly, bitching and grumbling at a low steady volume, but when he squeezes his eyes closed and puts his hand over Drake’s chest, trying not to gag, he feels Venom slink down his arm, over his fingers, and into the charred body before him.

There’s an entire minute where nothing happens, and Eddie thinks with a sinking panic that maybe he’d been mistaken, and that Drake is beyond help. But then whatever Venom’s doing must take, because like a horror movie put on rewind, the body before him slowly pieces back together. Drake’s burns fade away without scars, his skin knits and smooths, his bones pull and crack back into alignment. The rebar slides out of him with a sick _squelch_ as he’s pulled up to sitting, a puppet jerked around on a string, zombielike.

**_We have done what we can for this … loser._ **

Venom settles back under Eddie’s skin, roiling and displeased, and Drake jolts back into the world of the living, wide-eyed, animal-crazed, disoriented.

He catches sight of Eddie and there’s a spark of recognition in his eyes, and it looks like he’s trying hard to say something — and then he turns to the side and heaves up a mouthful of viscous red liquid. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, examines it blandly, and slumps back down into unconsciousness.

\--

So now Eddie has Carlton Drake crashing on his shitty couch in his shitty studio. Which is not ideal. Because had he died, Drake would’ve just been your average megalomaniacal murdering scumbag, but alive, he’s all those things, and also a federally wanted criminal.

Eddie shoves the remaining half of a microwave burrito in his mouth and washes it down with a swig of flat soda as he watches Drake watch him. The man hasn’t said a thing in two days. Just slept a lot, eaten a little, stared at the ceiling, and stared at Eddie. He has a way of somehow looking down his nose at Eddie, dignified and superior even though he’s lying flat on his back in overlarge borrowed clothes — dark liquid eyes, a hypnotic unblinking stare. Eddie can see how people might be captivated by this man.

**_And brainwashed. And manipulated._ **

“Right. Yeah. That too,” Eddie says. “My point is, there aren’t even _words_ for what he tried to do.”

**_What is he doing with his face? It makes us want to punch him in the mouth._ **

Drake’s smirking, is what he’s doing with his face, twisting his arch features into a smug, ugly mask. He finally opens his mouth and speaks.

“Then they’re just going to have to make up some new words for me, won’t they?”

“That’s not something to be proud of, you narcissistic maniac!” Eddie yells, curling his hands into fists. Anger churns in his stomach and Venom, riled up, rises up out of him as his looming black shadow. He should’ve just let Drake die on the shores of the Bay, the way Drake had let all those people die in his lab: alone, forgotten, in darkness, in horrific pain. But Eddie made his choice, and though he _still_ can’t rationalize it, he also can’t very well take it back now.

“He who can live in infamy is unworthy of life,” Drake intones, some Ivy League, fortune cookie bullshit. “You know what I did. And yet, you chose to save me.”

Eddie slams a hand down on the kitchen counter so hard that all the unwashed plates in his sink rattle.

“Shut the _fuck_ up, you — you — ”

**_Mundicidal xenoterrorist._ **

“Mundicidal xenoterrorist,” Eddie spits. Drake finally breaks the staring contest and returns his attention to the ever-growing water stain on the ceiling.

“That has a nice ring to it,” he says.

\--

Drake doesn’t retreat back into complete silence after that, but he doesn’t talk any more than he needs to, either. If Eddie didn’t know any better, he’d say Drake was _depressed._

The next time he says anything meaningful is a few nights later, when he’s halfway through picking at a small plate of burnt tater tots. So Eddie set the timer wrong, sue him. He’s a journalist, not a chef.

“Is there anything in your diet made with something other than a microwave?” Drake asks.

Eddie turns from his seat at the kitchen table and just stares for a long, incredulous moment.

“No, because I don’t have an army of private chefs at my disposal. Just eat the garbage junk food and shut up,” he says, and goes back to digging up dirt on a supposed migrant-child trafficking ring operating out of Modesto.

“I never had private chefs. I cook for myself,” Drake says, bitchily.

“Sure,” Eddie says. Drake probably _thinks_ he can cook. He can probably rich-people cook, making smoothies and kale salads out of those meal boxes where every ingredient comes packaged in a little plastic bag. He probably owns an eight-hundred-dollar juicer and drinks unfiltered rainwater.

“What do you want to eat?”

“Whatever. I don’t care,” Eddie says. Drake draws himself up to his full, uninspiring height and trains his contemptuous gaze on Eddie.

“What. Do you want. To eat.”

“I don’t know! I don’t care! Go scramble some fucking eggs, I’m trying to work!”

Drake rolls off the couch and beelines for the kitchen, looking utterly ridiculous with the sleeves of Eddie’s rattiest sweater cuffed three or four times up his forearms and Eddie’s sweatpants slipping off his hips. He triages the refrigerator, rattles out some pans and utensils, and starts scrambling eggs with a brisk, cold competence — gets fancy with it too, splash of cream, shredded cheese, bacon bits, garnish with the few wilting parsley leaves shoved into the back of the crisper drawer.

“I never let people make decisions for me. Not even about what I eat,” Drake says, plating the eggs with a neat flick of the wrist.

**_Control freak._ **

Eddie scoffs, like, _tell me about it_.

“Choice is a privilege,” Drake says. “And now _you_ have that privilege, so you should exercise it. You must.” He gives the entire heaping serving of food to Eddie and Venom, and returns to the couch and his sad plate of crispy blackened tater tots. Doesn’t wash the cookware, of course, because he’s a dick.

“Jesus Christ, do you have any lines that don’t come from a quote-a-day calendar?” Eddie says, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. He gives up all hope of getting any more work done for the night. “Fine. Give me the TED Talk. Choice is a privilege. Okay. And upon what is this privilege based?”

“Power, of course,” Drake says, looking at Eddie with an unyielding wide-eyed conviction. “You and your symbiote, Venom, you can choose to do anything you want now.”

**_Yes. We can._ **

“You know this, and it scares you, doesn’t it?”

 **_We are not_ ** **scared,** **_you pathetic, little man_**.

“ _You’re_ not. I don’t think your kind even knows what fear is. But Eddie, he knows, and he’s terrified,” Drake says, with a confidence that would be infuriating if Eddie’s heart wasn’t slamming against his chest, like it does whenever he thinks about exactly what he’s capable of now. Venom turns anxious, uncomprehending figure-eights under his skin. “That’s why you saved me. If you didn’t have Venom, you couldn’t have helped me. I would have died. But you did, so now it becomes, _do I_ choose _to let him die?_ And then, _if I choose to let him die, then what does that make me?_ ”

“Shut up,” Eddie says. His head begins to pound, and he grips the edge of the table so hard his fingers go numb.

“Would you kill one person to save another?”

“What?

“Answer the question.”

“No, of course not — I mean, unless — ”

“Would you kill one person to save five? Five thousand? Five million? Would you kill _two_ people to save five million? How about three? Four? Five against five million, would you do it? You have the power to make these choices now. So?”

“Drake — ”

“Let’s look at it the other way. Would you kill five million people to save one person? Would you kill five million people to save Anne Weying?”

 ** _“Shut up!”_** Eddie and Venom shout in unison, and the panes of glass in the windows rattle. “Jesus Christ, shut _up,_ shut the _fuck up!_ What do you know, you egomaniacal asshole?”

“I know the choices I made, Eddie!” Drake yells back, standing up from the couch. His plate of food tips off his lap. Stupid burnt little potato nuggets skitter across the floor. He takes a deep breath to calm himself and smooths down his borrowed sweater — a habitual motion, like he’s rearranging the lapels on a suit. He goes over to the silverware drawer, pulls out a fork, and points it at Eddie like he's pointing a gun. “A hundred dead in clinical trials to produce a vaccine that saved a hundred million. Six lives for the symbiote test to unlock the potential of saving so, _so_ many more. Are those such unacceptable choices? How are you going to save the world if you couldn’t even let one man die to spare your own feelings?”

“Who says I _want_ to save the world?”

“Who else is going to? Who else has the power to? I had the best that science and technology had to offer, and I could only do so much. But you have this miracle — you could do so much _more_.”

“Maybe me and my goddamn miracle are just going to live our lives doing whatever we want, and the rest of the world can just go fuck itself.”

“Seven-point-six billion against one. So that’s your price,” Drake says. He grins, showing a little razor-sliver of teeth. “Steep odds, even for me.”

Eddie snaps his mouth closed so swiftly he feels his teeth click together with a jolt. He’s been trapped, and he knows it. The plate of eggs sits in front of him, mocking and yellow.

“So I made a bad choice, saving you?” Eddie asks. His hands are shaking with impotent, unchanneled rage.

“You made a coward’s choice,” Drake says. His eyes burn fever-bright with the manic fervor of utter conviction. The sort of conviction that racks up a bodycount. “You a god among men, now, Eddie Brock. Time to decide what kind of god you will be.”

He tosses the fork he’s holding onto the table.

“Eat your fucking scrambled eggs.”

Eddie does as he’s told. They’re cold, congealed, absolutely delicious.

\--

Strangely enough, after that mindfucker of a conversation, Drake takes the crazy down several notches and Eddie starts coming home to a clean bathroom, folded laundry, and washed dishes. Most nights there’s even dinner. Not scrambled eggs again, and not rich-people ovo-lacto-paleo bullshit, either. Normal, tasty things like pasta and chicken fried rice. At first it’s jarring, and it kind of makes Eddie — and by extension, Venom — sort of itchy under the skin. It’s not like Drake is going to literally knife him in the back while he sleeps, he’s not that dumb, but Eddie can’t help but feel like the man is scheming somehow.

But then Eddie figures that Drake, supposed genius that he is, must be going stir-crazy cooped up all day with nothing to do and nobody to monologue at, and after about a week Eddie decides he’s fine with it.

When Eddie esconces himself on the sofa, laptop balanced on his knees, trying to edit his latest segment into some semblance of watchability, Drake stations himself right next to him, blatantly watching over his shoulder. Sitting there with his legs folded under him and his arms wrapped around him like an overlarge, weirdly polite cat.

“Scum of the earth,” Drake says.

“Excuse me?” Eddie says. Drake motions at the footage Eddie had shot. That Modesto story had finally came to fruition over the weekend, a series of horribly depressing revelations strung together like a necklace where each bead was another stomach-turning image of starving, scared, half-feral little kids, huddled in basements and chained up in yards.

“Whoever did that deserves to die.”

Eddie agrees. Of course he does. But this story is making him angry and depressed, and he feels like pushing Drake’s buttons a little. He’s almost starting to enjoy verbally sparring with the man, even though it usually ends in a resounding K.O. for Drake.

“What are your odds. What is the _choice_ here,” Eddie says, mockingly. He _hopes_ Drake would give him a speech justifying where children fit into his fucked-up calculus of human lives saved and sacrificed, but this time, Drake doesn’t rise to the bait. Just narrows his eyes and crosses his arms.

“One to two billion,” he says, immediately.

“Where’d you get that number?”

“There’s two billion children in this world.”

And no question about who the _one_ is. Eddie mentally pages through every article he’d ever been forced to read about the guy, and recalls a lot of charitable foundations for orphans, foster kids, young immigrants, victims of bullying, the busloads of schoolkids he’d allowed in to smear up his pristine, polished lab with their greasy hands and runny noses.

At the time, Eddie had thought it was just good PR — no better photo op than a rich tech guy surrounded by a legion of adoring underprivileged children — but the look in Drake’s eyes as he parses through the footage on Eddie’s laptop tells him it’s more than just that.

“That’s why I started Life Foundation. So that one day, no child would ever have to learn … ” he trails off, looking at Eddie’s laptop screen without really seeing it, his eyes flat and hard.

“Learn what?”

“Learn what a sick, sad, disappointing world this is," Drake says. Eddie wonders how old Drake was when he'dlearned, and how. "Because one day, the world would just … not be like that. Because I would fix it. I _could_ fix it.”

Silence falls. Eddie looks at Drake, finds he can’t hold his gaze, and looks away. He clears his throat. Drake shakes himself out of his reverie.

“I’m going to make food,” he says, and without another word, he gets to work cooking. Eddie watches him, and wonders. It’s hard to imagine that Drake was once a kid. He probably came out of the womb in an impeccable and expensive suit with that disdainful look on his face. It’s not a mental image that meshes neatly into visions of playgrounds and cafeterias and field trips to the zoo. Come to think of it, Eddie can’t remember a single article about Drake where he talked much about his past — it was always forward-looking with this guy, better cures, faster cars, bigger rockets.

“Drake, who taught you how to cook?” Eddie asks.

“I taught myself,” Drake says. “Everything I know how to do, I taught myself.”

\--

It storms one night about a week later, like the heavens themselves splitting open and the cosmic floodwaters pouring down, and Eddie’s never liked it, all that thunder and lightning, and he lies in bed cringing with anxiety until Venom surfaces from within him and offers to do something about it.

They do this sometimes, when Eddie’s too jittery to sleep. He gets naked and sprawls out flat in bed, and Venom cocoons around him, humming lightly. The closest he can get to describing the feeling is like having a weighted blanket and a purring cat on him at the same time. It’s warm and safe and comfortable, and also there’s an edge of orgasmic bliss to it that drives him half of out of his mind as he just lays there, breathing hard, keening a little, distracted now from the lashing of the rainstorm and the thunder rattling the windowpanes.

It’s not sex, but it’s not _not_ sex, and it’s definitely not something he wants Drake walking in on. Except of course, he does.

“What the everloving _fuck,_ man,” Eddie yelps, scrambling for something to cover himself with as Venom rises up, teeth flashing and hackles raised. “No, Venom, stop, no bite, bad. Fuck. You ever heard of knocking?”

“I did, but you didn’t hear me.” Drake squints at Eddie, all disheveled, squints at Venom, all defensive, puts two and two together, and raises an eyebrow so knowingly that Eddie flushes hot all over. But all Drake does is gesture over his shoulder. “Your roof is leaking. Over the couch.”

“Goddamnit,” Eddie says, rubbing a hand over his eyes. This entire building is a shithole. He’s constantly  tempted to do a scathing investigative piece on his landlord, except he doesn’t feel like causing his own eviction. “There’s a bucket under the sink.”

“Yeah. I set it out,” Drake says, rifling through the closet.

“What the hell are you doing?” Eddie says, raising his voice over the rain lashing against the windowpane.

“Getting a blanket so I don’t have to sleep on your rug. It’s filthy.”

There’s more clattering, and a thud as something falls off a shelf. Eddie groans. It’s three in the morning. He doesn’t want to deal with Drake’s weird thing about cleanliness, or his inevitable bitching come morning. Eddie shifts over grumpily, freeing up some room on his bed.

“Come on,” he says. “Don’t make it weird.” Drake side-eyes him for a beat, but apparently he’d rather take his chances sleeping with a _literal alien,_ because he slides into bed next to Eddie. He takes up barely any room at all, slight and small as he is, but Eddie’s bed just almost not big enough for two people.

So they lie there, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, looking at the ceiling. There is exactly twenty-six seconds of awkward, awkward silence.

“What does it feel like, being intimate with a symbi — ”

“Jesus. Fucking. Christ. Shut _up_ ,” Eddie says, though part of him thinks darkly, _do you want to find out?_ Unprompted images flash into his mind: Drake’s hands, his neck, his unflinching dark eyes, his pretty, smirking mouth, his skin coated in shining black, his legs spread, his back arched, sleek, beautiful —

**_There’s no accounting for taste, but if that is what you want, he could very easily be persuaded._ **

Venom sounds amused, which is how Eddie knows those were his _own_ thoughts, not Venom’s projected mind games, and that’s the absolute last straw for him. He’s still too keyed-up to deal with this. He’s going to rescind his offer, and Drake is just going to have to deal with the gross-ass bedbug-infested rug until the rain stops.

“Does it feel good?” Drake asks, before Eddie can kick him out of bed. Eddie lets out a long, exasperated sigh and just — gives up. Sure. Whatever. They can have this conversation instead. He’s already got a questionably sane mundicidal xenoterrorist in his bed that he’s apparently also sort of of horny for, _might as well_ discuss alien sex with him. Why not.

“Yes, it feels good. It’s sex. Sex feels good.” Eddie feels like he’s explaining this to a clueless teenager, and he also feels like a colossal creep. In his head, Venom is cackling with laughter. “Wouldn’t you know? Did Riot never — you know?”

“No,” Drake says, slowly, like he’s trying to reconcile some scientific anomaly with his current understanding of the world. “I think Riot was different.”

“Different how?”

“Does it hurt, being bonded to Venom?”

“No, of course not,” Eddie says, in confusion. It feels natural. It feels like the most natural, easy thing in the world. The moment Venom crawled into him, it was like a blind man opening his eyes for the first time.

**_Aww. That is the nicest thing you have ever said about us._ **

“... did it hurt with Riot?”

“It was uncomfortable, mostly. But sometimes it hurt,” Drake says, so quietly Eddie almost doesn’t hear him over the rain. “Like burning from the inside out.”

**_Not all of us are so kind with our hosts. Riot especially._ **

“Oh,” Eddie says. He thinks about Drake’s charred-up body on the shores of the San Francisco Bay, and is suffused with a vague and abject emotion that he can neither define nor process.

“It was worth it,” Drake says, with the utter conviction of a martyr. Eddie risks a glance over, and sees Drake’s eyes glinting in what dim moonlight filters through the dirty window.

**_He would have killed you, sooner or later._ **

Venom, speaking through Eddie’s mouth. Drake, utterly unfazed.

“I know. I could feel it. But it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. Those who fear death also fear glory.”

Jesus Christ. Eddie would almost rather have talked about alienfucking, at this point, but thankfully, the conversation ends there. Drake turns his back to Eddie and falls silent, presumably asleep. Eddie turns his back to Drake, and lies there unable to sleep for what feels like forever, until all of a sudden he jolts awake in the bright sunlight to an empty bed, having overslept his alarm.

\--

“Why did it have to be saving the world?” Eddie asks, gesturing expansively and nearly spilling his drink on the couch. He’s nine beers down — Venom’s metabolism has done _wonders_ for his alcohol tolerance, though he’s about at the point where the world is pleasantly hazy and loose — and the terrible reality show on TV can’t hold his attention anymore. Drake seems inexplicably fascinated by it.

“As compared to what?” he asks, not taking his eyes off the squabbling couple on screen.

“I dunno. A house and a wife and two kids and a dog, or whatever.”

**_Not a wife, Eddie._ **

“Or a husband, I’m not judging.” He’s a little surprised, but not really. Venom’s been in Drake’s head, after all. This is San Francisco, after all. “You know. What everyone else wants.”

“Who said I never wanted that?” he says, with an unamused quirk of his mouth. Something’s changed about the way Drake is looking at the TV. It’s less out of interest now, and more out of studiously avoiding Eddie’s gaze.

“Only human after all,” Eddie says smugly. “So what happened?”

“Progress requires sacrifice,” Drake says, and for the first time, he sounds bitter.

Eddie shakes his head, feeling irrationally angry for no reason. Three weeks of this, and Drake still hasn’t dropped his act, and Eddie has the sinking realization that it might not be an act after all. This might just be Drake, to his core. That it’s inseparable from everything else in him, all the good in him, corrupted by this egomaniacal god-complex messiah-complex.

And for some reason, that realization hits him like a sucker punch in the gut.

“More like, your daddy didn’t love you enough, or your boyfriend dumped you, and you decided to go seek the approval of the entire world instead of facing up to rejection like the rest of us,” Eddie says, sneering and nasty and strangely heartsick. Why does he feel so _hurt_ that Drake is still just exactly who he appears to be? Did he forget who Drake was, what he had done? “That’s like, the worst supervillain origin story.”

“It doesn’t matter what happened to me. I was always meant for greater things,” Drake says, through gritted teeth, which is how Eddie knows he’s hit a nerve. “And I _did_ greater things. Millions of people love me. They need me.”

**_He is so full of shit._ **

“You’re _delusional_. Millions of people blindly worship you. The idea of you. That’s not the same thing as love, Drake.”

“Then maybe you have never truly loved, Eddie Brock,” Drake hisses through his smirk, and Eddie pelts his half-empty bottle of beer across the room and it shatters like a gunshot against the kitchen cabinets. He knows he’s being provoked, but he doesn’t care. More than anything else he wants to wipe that arrogant superior complacent ever-so-carefully controlled look off of Carlton Drake’s face. Just once he wants to see Drake completely fucking _lose it_.

Eddie lurches forward, grabs Drake by the shoulders and takes him down flat to the sofa and holds him there, shuts him up with his mouth on Drake’s. Drake takes it easily, willingly, eyes closed and his breath coming in sharp, ragged gasps. But despite everything, he still wears that sneer on his face. Unwilling to capitulate, even now.

Eddie snarls and presses in harder, a hand around Drake’s neck, a leg jammed between Drake’s legs, making him work for it. At some point he notices there’s slick black streaming out down his arms, over his hands, down his face, and over Drake’s skin.

“Come on, come on, do it, Eddie, Venom, do it,” Drake chokes out, gasping for air, and he laughs and he laughs, the only time he’s ever laughed in the three-something weeks he’s been here, and he’s still laughing as he tips his head back and comes.

Eddie lets Drake go as if scalded.

“I hate you,” Eddie snarls, kneeling over Drake’s sprawled body, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, sweating through his clothes, panting like a racehorse. He wants to throw up.

“The opposite of love is not hate,” Drake says. His voice sounds hoarse, and a mass of bruises is already starting to show on his neck, though subtle against his dark skin. “It’s apathy.”

Not for the first time, Eddie wonders what it must _be_ like in Drake’s head. It must be fucking exhausting.

 **_You have no idea_**.

He gets a brief mental transmission of a space so bright with light it blinds, an empty space suffused with the memory of noise, a party after the guests have all left, the sound of Drake’s own voice echoing, cut glass, polished mirrors, a child’s laughter, a child's cries, right angles, impeccable neatness, perfect posture.

**_He really is a genius, you know. What a shame._ **

\--

The next morning, Drake is gone from the apartment, and that night, Eddie turns on the news to a media superfrenzy.

After being presumed dead for three weeks and four days, Carlton Drake walks out of the San Francisco Bay, spotlit by the glare of no less than three police choppers, greeted by a SWAT team and a whole squadron of SFPD’s finest, all weapons trained on this one lone figure as he emerges from the water.

A miracle incarnate, even in defeat. Defeat, but on his own terms. Eddie has never felt so — so _used,_ and _betrayed_ in his life.

“No, I don’t remember anything,” Drake is saying, tinny and indistinct over the ruckus of the crime scene. Even the police seem reverent, hesitant to touch him even as they try and cuff him. Press gets in his face with the cameras and mics, and he dictates to them with his made-for-media voice on.

“Mr. Drake, do you believe in miracles?” a journalist is yelling, her voice rising above the clamor.

“Oh, yes,” Drake says, as he walks toward the cameras and ducks into the back of a waiting police cruiser, still doing that ugly, punchable thing with his face. "Something must have saved me from dying alone down there, so I could die with the whole world watching. Something out there must really love me."

**Author's Note:**

> that … went places i wasn’t expecting, and i have nothing to say for myself.
> 
> anyway, i hope y’all enjoyed this, and please let me know what you think!


End file.
